Since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force operationalised the J-20 fifth generation fighter in February 2017, which made China only the second country in the
You’ve missed another aspect of this. Our existing fighter jets are limited in their capabilities by the meat sack that has to be inside them. We are capable of making machines that can perform maneuvers that would kill the human inside it very quickly. We limit them to prevent this.
None of that really matters for modern, beyond visual range, aircraft to aircraft combat, or aircraft trying to evade ground launched AA missiles.
What actually matters is being able to detect a missile is locked onto you in time, what angle its coming at you from, then jamming the oncoming missile, timing your flare/chaff release correctly, then correctly timing your non hyper extreme, but properly oriented/angled evasive manuever depending on the speed and approach vector of the missile.
If you do not do that entire dance timed and angled correctly, a few extra G range of possible manuevers is not likely to make a difference.
Air to air missiles do not need to physically contact their target before explosing to combat neutralize them, they haven’t since at least the 80s if not earlier.
An Aim 9, for example, has a kill radius of about 30ft, they detonate via proximity fuses, not contact fuses. There are many larger AA missiles with larger kill radii than that.
Just barely juking one likely means you are still dead, you have the get the thing to entirely lose lock and veer significantly away from you (or you from it), such that it isn’t likely to regain lock again.
Also your drone has to deal with network latency, like playing in a laggy video game server, due to being remotely operated from potentially hundreds of miles away, further decreasing reaction time, so good luck with all that timing.
Or, maybe you did the missle’s job for it by pulling a sustained 12 G manuever that caused the drone’s wings to rip off.
Doing insane evasive manuevers to lose a missile lock is mostly movie/video game stuff… it looks really cool and makes the viewer/player think that incredible skill gives you a bonus life, but reality doesn’t work like that.
EDIT: The absolutely main, primary wrong impression you will get about intense, military aircraft flight from only watching movies and playing video games is the idea that aircraft bodies are basically solid blocks of homogenous metal that can only be broken by weapons damage.
Movies very rarely depict an aircraft pulling up or turning or diving so hard, at a high speed, that it basically rips itself apart from the drag.
This is because it almost always kills the pilot.
You have to watch like airshow disaster videos to see what that actually looks like.
Even flight simulators don’t really depict this visually. MSFT Flight Sim / FSX will just give you a ‘overstressed’ pause/fail screen, but doesn’t bother to actually render your 777’s wings fucking snapping off. I don’t think DCS even does, but its been quite a while since I’ve played, might be wrong.
Arcadier/less realistic games (Ace Combat, Battlefield Series, Warthunder on anything other than full sim mode?) basically never depict this either.
I’ve actually only been able to even kind of simulate this properly in a game with a heavily realism modded Kerbal Space Program.
Maneuvers do not need to be performed by a human either. They’re undertaken faster by direct on-board computers that are then augmented by pilot. A 50-100ms latency will be completely offset by the machine’s ability to react and think being vastly superior to any pilot.
If you are describing computer assisted, fly by wire systems… you’ve basically got it backwards.
The human inputs a desired command to the yoke and pedals, and the computer translates this from an absolute, direct command to the control surfaces, into a smoothed out set of inputs that takes into account all the other flaps settings and trim levels and slight difference in thrust between different engines and accounts for a difference in center of gravity due to different fuels tanks being differently full or empty and all that kinda stuff.
If you are describing a system on board an aircraft that engages some kind of autopilot for evasive manuevers in a missile lock scenario, that’s news to me and I’d love to learn more about it… as far as I am aware, especially on a military aircraft, you’ll have systems like ‘bitchin betty’ that’ll scream commands at you, but I’ve never heard of a system that takes control away from the pilot and then makes extreme manuevers.
(Outside of the recent Boeing Max MCAS problems, they were not designed to do extreme manuevers, but malfunctioned due to software bugs and instrument failures… oh and Boeing didn’t fucking tell the pilots it was even on the aircraft, nor how to actually turn it off when it fucked up)
As for the network latency, it could be significantly worse effective latency than your 50 to 100ms depending on distance and atmospheric conditions causing packet loss, the signal may be being relayed through a variety of different systems… but all the specifics on that are or would be very classified.
And, I mentioned it in my other reply in this thread but not to you, but its relevant here:
You can jam a drone operator’s signal. Happens all the time right now in Ukraine. That means your feed cuts out and you completely lose control.
Even worse, you can hack into it, hijack it, and gain control of the drone.
These are extremely significant problems with remotely operated weapons of war.
One potential solution to this is having an extremely advanced autopilot, to the point that its functionally an AI, running locally onboard the drone fighter jet, to make its own decisions should remote operator contact be lost.
But uh… go watch some Tesla FSD videos to see how that can go wrong…
None of that really matters for modern, beyond visual range, aircraft to aircraft combat, or aircraft trying to evade ground launched AA missiles.
What actually matters is being able to detect a missile is locked onto you in time, what angle its coming at you from, then jamming the oncoming missile, timing your flare/chaff release correctly, then correctly timing your non hyper extreme, but properly oriented/angled evasive manuever depending on the speed and approach vector of the missile.
If you do not do that entire dance timed and angled correctly, a few extra G range of possible manuevers is not likely to make a difference.
Air to air missiles do not need to physically contact their target before explosing to combat neutralize them, they haven’t since at least the 80s if not earlier.
An Aim 9, for example, has a kill radius of about 30ft, they detonate via proximity fuses, not contact fuses. There are many larger AA missiles with larger kill radii than that.
Just barely juking one likely means you are still dead, you have the get the thing to entirely lose lock and veer significantly away from you (or you from it), such that it isn’t likely to regain lock again.
Also your drone has to deal with network latency, like playing in a laggy video game server, due to being remotely operated from potentially hundreds of miles away, further decreasing reaction time, so good luck with all that timing.
Or, maybe you did the missle’s job for it by pulling a sustained 12 G manuever that caused the drone’s wings to rip off.
Doing insane evasive manuevers to lose a missile lock is mostly movie/video game stuff… it looks really cool and makes the viewer/player think that incredible skill gives you a bonus life, but reality doesn’t work like that.
EDIT: The absolutely main, primary wrong impression you will get about intense, military aircraft flight from only watching movies and playing video games is the idea that aircraft bodies are basically solid blocks of homogenous metal that can only be broken by weapons damage.
Movies very rarely depict an aircraft pulling up or turning or diving so hard, at a high speed, that it basically rips itself apart from the drag.
This is because it almost always kills the pilot.
You have to watch like airshow disaster videos to see what that actually looks like.
Even flight simulators don’t really depict this visually. MSFT Flight Sim / FSX will just give you a ‘overstressed’ pause/fail screen, but doesn’t bother to actually render your 777’s wings fucking snapping off. I don’t think DCS even does, but its been quite a while since I’ve played, might be wrong.
Arcadier/less realistic games (Ace Combat, Battlefield Series, Warthunder on anything other than full sim mode?) basically never depict this either.
I’ve actually only been able to even kind of simulate this properly in a game with a heavily realism modded Kerbal Space Program.
Maneuvers do not need to be performed by a human either. They’re undertaken faster by direct on-board computers that are then augmented by pilot. A 50-100ms latency will be completely offset by the machine’s ability to react and think being vastly superior to any pilot.
If you are describing computer assisted, fly by wire systems… you’ve basically got it backwards.
The human inputs a desired command to the yoke and pedals, and the computer translates this from an absolute, direct command to the control surfaces, into a smoothed out set of inputs that takes into account all the other flaps settings and trim levels and slight difference in thrust between different engines and accounts for a difference in center of gravity due to different fuels tanks being differently full or empty and all that kinda stuff.
If you are describing a system on board an aircraft that engages some kind of autopilot for evasive manuevers in a missile lock scenario, that’s news to me and I’d love to learn more about it… as far as I am aware, especially on a military aircraft, you’ll have systems like ‘bitchin betty’ that’ll scream commands at you, but I’ve never heard of a system that takes control away from the pilot and then makes extreme manuevers.
(Outside of the recent Boeing Max MCAS problems, they were not designed to do extreme manuevers, but malfunctioned due to software bugs and instrument failures… oh and Boeing didn’t fucking tell the pilots it was even on the aircraft, nor how to actually turn it off when it fucked up)
As for the network latency, it could be significantly worse effective latency than your 50 to 100ms depending on distance and atmospheric conditions causing packet loss, the signal may be being relayed through a variety of different systems… but all the specifics on that are or would be very classified.
And, I mentioned it in my other reply in this thread but not to you, but its relevant here:
You can jam a drone operator’s signal. Happens all the time right now in Ukraine. That means your feed cuts out and you completely lose control.
Even worse, you can hack into it, hijack it, and gain control of the drone.
These are extremely significant problems with remotely operated weapons of war.
One potential solution to this is having an extremely advanced autopilot, to the point that its functionally an AI, running locally onboard the drone fighter jet, to make its own decisions should remote operator contact be lost.
But uh… go watch some Tesla FSD videos to see how that can go wrong…